Tag Archives: Sudokiller

This is a guest post by Hilkman translated from the German article originally published on his blog Du Bist Dran!

Brazil

This weekend the Diversão Offline in Rio de Janeiro is about to take place, an event that is sometimes called the “Brazilian Essen”. With about 5000 visitors on each of the two days it of course isn’t comparable in size, but it is definitely one of the biggest board game events in Latin America. Many publishers showcase their more or less new games there. While I announced some things in the last weeks here already, there is still a lot more to go. Sadly some of the publishers only announce their new games on site.

At least I have found this:

It doesn’t seem as if you could announce a merger in a more charming fashion… the new publisher Diceberry Editora of Iaggo Piffero, who just prepared to launch his first micro game, was taken over, before doing so, by Potato Cat (who we talked about here already). That’s something you don’t see every day. Diceberry will continue as a separate studio, though, and will likely be responsible for micro games at first. It begins with three releases:

Jetpack Lhama sounds gloriously quirky. The paths on which the Lamas transport goods have been destroyed by natural disasters and now they need to think of something new. What would be more appropriate than jet packs? So they strap them on their backs and get going. On the way they sadly have to get through city ruins and take care not to hit old stone pillars and, this is very important, not to get hit with a curse, which can happen easily once in a while. It sounds like it is right up my alley. Jetpack Lhama is a micro game, in which the racing track is put together with cards.

Magic Flow doesn’t seem to be a lot less absurd to me. Here the players take the role of magical rappers, who have to fight monsters with their rhymes. Each monster has a certain verse length and the card back determines a specific way of death. You have to find fitting rhymes very quickly, so that the other magical rappers don’t get it first. It sounds rather bizarre to me and apparently it’s even language independent. I’d like to take a closer look at this as well.

The big Sudoku wave is possibly over already again, but sometimes you still see someone fill squares with numbers at a bus stop. If that’s not interactive enough for you, you might want to try Sudokiller. A detective and a serial killer circle around each other here in 1880s London. The killer owns one of the numbers, while another belongs to his next victim. The detective then has to find out which of the numbers these are, before the Sudoku has been completely solved.

All three games have been developed and illustrated by Iaggo Piffero. And when I take a look at these unusual descriptions, I’m not surprised by Potato Cats interest.

Mine has definitely been sparked, and I’ll see that I can get my hands on them soon.

Valente is a dog, who is split in two between two women (a cat and a panda lady). The players are now trying to get Valente onto their side by releasing comics. Those consist of three cards each (pictures), and once a strip is finished, he becomes a part of the overall story and influences Valente’s decisions. Valente is a comic character made by Cafaggi, that has existed for a while already and hasn’t been created specifically for this game. The author of the game is Renato Simões and the game will be released by Geeks N‘ Orcs.

Mexico

Cat aficionado Ramón López releases his games through his own publishing house called Guerras Gato Games and most of them revolve around cats. His first game, Guerras Gato („Cat wars“), was first published in 2016 and is now being released in the second edition. What it’s about is hardly hard to guess: Leaders of cats send their subordinates at their enemies – and you only have nine lives. When you’re defeated for the ninth time, you leave the game and the last living cat wins. It has been illustrated by an artist that can be found under the name Shengolia.
Shengolia has also illustrated another one of López‘ games, namely Miaurcenarios. It is a bit hard to translate it, this time around – mercenarios means mercenaries and miau means miau. Here the cats are ninjas and have to beat, among others, evil rats. The illustrators of Bakenoko: Soul Reaper, which is the third game in the series, come from a comic event called Draw Break. This is the only game of the three, in which the cat pictures aren’t the focus. Whoever is capable of speaking Spanish and wants to take a look at the games, you can find short explanation videos here. For October there’s already the next cat game announced. I’ll report on it then.

Peru

Years ago I got the assignment to develop a game on the subject of “fair trade in communal procurement policy” together with Reinhold Wittig. This was quite a challenge, but in the end we kind of managed to put something reasonable together, even on such an un-sexy sounding subject. Working supposedly boring subjects into games is something that occurred to others as well, for example the team of Anevi, with their new release “En Busca del TeISOro Perdido”. The title actually means “the search for the hidden treasure”, but there’s the word ISO woven into the word treasure. Why? Well, because the game is about the ISO-45001-standard, that describes requirements for worker protection management. It has been published together with Ludo Prevención.